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Though this particular gag did not originate in The '90s, it became very popular for a long time following the smashing success of Disney's Aladdin.

A bit of trivia: This trope was almost called "The Genie Knows John Wayne". In the original script, Genie was supposed to do a John Wayne impression (note the line about being a "straight shooter"). But Robin Williams did a better Jack Nicholson impression.* Oddly enough, Williams explained his process to create that impression in one special as "you take John Wayne and tighten up his ass."

For a bunch of villains who've never previously been to Earth, the original English dub of Dragon Ball Z suggests they know an awful lot about its customs, cuisine and pop culture. Regardless of any dubbing, there's also the fact that the Ginyu Force settles every dispute with RockPaperScissors, even though they're all totally different species from presumably different planets who've also never been to Earth before. The non-actiony parts of the entire Dragon Ball saga are largely dictated by Rule of Funny, however.

Dr. Stone is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth after everyone suddenly turned to stone for thousands of years and all of human civilization and progress was completely erased, with only a handful of people recovering from their petrification. The main character eventually stumbles upon a tribe of people he concludes must be descendants of other people who de-petrified generations ago, and when he notices them making reference to the legend of Momotaro, he finds out that the village shaman has been keeping such trivia alive through oral tradition (though by this point the Momotaro legend has turned into a Fist of the North Star parody.)

The Pokémon anime occasionally does this, with characters making pop culture references or observations that don't make sense given the world the series takes place in. For example, in The Ghost of Maiden's Peak, a Gastly turns into a mongoose to scare Jessie's Ekans (a snake-like Pokemon), despite real animals being typically absent from the setting.

Comic Books

The Sandman: Death's home as shown in The Sandman Special - The Song of Orpheus has several contemporary, late-20th century objects, while the story itself is set in Ancient Greece. Orpheus suffers a mild shock upon seeing it.

The Genie from Disney's Aladdin is this to the max, as well as the Trope Namer. His accurate impressions of movie stars (such as, notably, Jack Nicholson) provided ample Parental Bonuses, and like Merlin in The Sword in the Stone, he exhibits ample working knowledge of twentieth-century zeitgeist and technology. In the sequels and television series that followed, he frequently alluded to several other Disney franchises and impersonated their characters, including Pumbaa from The Lion King and Pinocchio.

Worth noting is that Aladdin lampshades the Genie's tendency to do this in the cartoon series. "What's the genie doing?" "Dreaming about references to some form of entertainment that hasn't been invented yet." It's occasionally mentioned that Genie sometimes time-travels in his spare time, which explains how he knows about pop culture icons from the future. There is one episode of the show that explictly shows him in another time, with Napoleon. There's also a fairly popular fan theory that the movie actually takes place in the distant ''future'', which also explains it handily.

In the first The Lion King, Zazu, while being held prisoner, sings "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen", "It's a Small World After All", and "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" in that order, while at one point Timon and Pumbaa sing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight". The P.O.V. Sequel, meanwhile, had Timon and Pumbaa making jokes like, "We moved into the theater district," and "Something tells me this ain't the traveling company of Riverdance" (followed by them making the dance from that play as they exit the scene). Though that said, The Lion King doesn't necessarily take place in the past. But the African savanna without any human settlements nearby is close enough.

During their musical number, the gargoyles in The Hunchback of Notre Dame are seen playing a piano centuries before it was invented, as well as throwing in references to Michelangelo Buonarroti's David (the film is set nearly a quarter-century before the statue's completion) and Amadeus (an Actor Allusion; Tom Hulce, who plays Quasimodo, also played Mozart). And there's a huge shout-out to The Wizard of Oz when Laverne "sics" her birds on the enemy...

Played with in Hercules, with the side characters making pop culture jokes masked under Ancient Greek references: Phil refers to Thebes as "The Big Olive", Meg makes reference to seeing through Hercules' act "in a Peloponnesian minute", Panic yells for someone to "call IXII", etc. Played straight with Hades who makes references to "halftime" and tennis, and with Meg when she compares Pain and Panic to costumed theme park characters.

Mushu in Mulan gets to do most of the anachronistic jokes, including using a modern toothbrush after biting Ling, and lamenting about not having an entourage.

Gizmo, and the eponymous creatures from Gremlins, are like this. In the first movie, this quality is restricted to their love of the movie Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, but in the sequel (a more humorous take on the first movie's premise), the gremlins are total pop culture junkies mere hours after having been spawned, going so far as to stage elaborate recreations of scenes from Batman (1989), The Wizard of Oz, and The Phantom of the Opera, among others, plus their enormous, balls-to-the-wall musical rendition of 'New York, New York'. It's somewhat more reasonable with Gizmo, since Billy taught him to watch television, and thus his infatuation with Rambo makes some sort of sense. Especially since he was watching the film just before donning the costume.

Though the world of The Flintstones seems to be so much like the contemporary Real Life world that it would be unsurprising, in terms of continuity, if Fred were watching his TV (made out of stone casing, of course), and remarking on how he's a big fan of The Honeymooners.

In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, he calls Rocket a "trash panda", a memetic alternate name for raccoons. He should have absolutely no idea that Internet memes exist.

Korg introduces himself in Thor: Ragnarok with a RockPaperScissors joke, even though he's a Kronan from Sakaar. There have been a few Earthlings on Sakaar, but there's no indication that he interacted with them.

Literature

The Once and Future King has Merlin make all kinds of references to 20th century events and culture in "The Sword in the Stone," to the point that this section is more of a satire and commentary on T. H. White's time than it is a retelling of Arthurian myth.

The butterfly in The Last Unicorn. All of its conversation consists of random quotes, some of them suspiciously modern-sounding for the world it lives in.

The Myth Adventures series is full of Schizo Tech, with lizard-drawn carriages in the streets and computers in the banks. This still doesn't explain the constant pop culture references, as the human home dimension is stuck in the Middle Ages and is definitively not Earth.

Justified: The Medieval European Fantasy dimension is Klah, not Earth. The fact that McDonald's apparently has extradimensional franchises and a reference to one former villain selling hot dogs on Coney Island suggests Earth is at least in the modern day.

Occurs frequently in Discworld, explained by the characters being hit by cross-dimensional inspiration particles, morphic resonance between universes, and of course the Theory of Narrative Causality. A common Lampshade Hanging is for another character to question the line, only for the first character to suddenly realise they don't get the reference either, and have no idea why they said it.

In the Relativity story "Rune Returns... Again", a two-thousand-year-old mummy reanimated using magic is somehow familiar with Taxi Driver.

Mummy: Raw rar rar rar rar?note You talkin' to me?

Live-Action TV

The Doctor is a time traveler, so he often references time periods that occur before or after the time period he's currently visiting. For example, he once mentioned having read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, when the episode aired months before the book was released. Not surprisingly, Martha's in-universe ad-lib of the Disarming Charm, which wouldn't be conceived of for another 400 years, also played a major role in preventing the end of the world at the turn of the 17th century.

Crow, Tom Servo, Gypsy and even Cambot from Mystery Science Theater 3000 drop pop culture references left and right when riffing or doing sketches, despite never having been to Earth and having limited communications to the planet. Joel might have programmed them with these references, but whatever. It's just a show, as the theme song reminds us.

Though Joel will occasionally call them on it... a good example being sometimes Tom talks about his time in school, only for Joel to remind him that he was built on the Satellite of Love. Mike, as less of an authority figure, tends to get bullied if he tries to protest to their inexplicable references.

Despite being born and raised in the bowels of a ship three million years into deep space, Cat from Red Dwarf seems to have a solid grasp of 20th-century pop culture.

Justified; two episodes have shown Lister and The Cat watching old cartoons like The Flintstones.

In the 1998 miniseries Merlin (taking place in the 5th century) the shape-shifting gnome Frik played by Martin Short constantly switches between anachronistic personas including a pirate, a Chinese houseboy, an aristocrat with Louis XIV hair, snooty professor in an Oxford cap, and a dashing swashbuckler with a shortsword. It is mentioned that the Fae can see into the future, however.

The characters of Touhou, ranging from humans to demons, tend to all freely make references to recent Japanese pop culture, despite being sealed off from the modern world (although elements of the modern world keep finding their way into Gensokyo, usually Yukari's fault).

Another Scumm game, Simon the Sorcerer contains a fair share of references also. Somewhat justified what with Simon being transported from a modern world into a magical fantasy realm, but the fantasy realm itself seems pretty heavy on the references and not just to fairy tales and fantasy books, mind you.

Black & White: The world you rule over seems ancient and fantasy-like, but The Consciences reference everything from South Park to thrash metal.

Colombia in BioShock Infinite has early 20th versions of songs such as Girls Just Want to Have Fun. This is because they've been making contact with alternate timelines and futures to acquire technology and pop culture.

Webcomics

Richard from Looking for Group is a partial example, what with webcomics generally not needing any Parental Bonus, but otherwise fits: in the Medieval Fantasy setting, the warlock is quite prone to anachronistic (Anageographic? Anaparallelrealitic?) references to pop culture.

Angel from Castlevania RPG. Constantly makes references to culture and events that may not EVER exist in that universe.

Merlin does this a lot in the baseline arc of Arthur, King of Time and Space, since his characterisation owes a lot to T. H. White's Merlin. For example, when Lancelot and Galehaute are in combat with a zombie parrot, and realise that it's trying to find a shallow point in the river where it can cross to the pine forest on the other side, Merlin suddenly pops up, having apparently tracked them down just to say "So the dead parrot is fording for the pines!"

In Melonpool, Melotians have the natural ability to pick up Earth TV braodcasts with the antennae growing out of their heads. The main character, Mayberry Melonpool, is completely obsessed with them - especially Star Trek.

The alien title character of Zortic is similarly obsessed with Earth's TV transmissions, and is also a huge Trekkie. The two strips have even crossed over more than once.

In Tous à l'Ouest, when Lucky Luke reunites with his pet Rantanplan, the dog has a hard time remembering where he's seen this cowboy before. After racking his brain for a while he eventually comes to the wrong conclusion that Luke is Clint Eastwood and asks for his autograph. Also counts as Achievements in Ignorance.

Parodied in an episode of The Critic, in which Jay's friend Jeremy Hawke has a role in a somewhat... different adaption of Pinocchio. In this version, a "beige fairy" appears, clearly spoofing Robin Williams' Genie in voice, mannerisms, and pop culture references.

The Junkions from The Transformers are the kings of the Aliens Steal Cable version of this. Their entire language was constructed from Earth television broadcasts they intercepted, and they speak in nothing but ad jingles and other TV references.

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